If your parish is like mine, your staff (and maybe you!) are already planning for the coming liturgical year. A late Easter (April 24!) means that Good Friday is the last day of classes here at the university. Lent begins the week before Spring Break. How’s that for the journey with Jesus into the desert?

We’ve slotted in Confirmation (pending our archbishop’s approval) for Second Sunday of Easter, mid-afternoon. (They aim for a Sunday whenever possible.) First Communion will be celebrated on its usual Saturday night–it’s our least-attended Mass–on May 14th. Anybody going with the secular calendar to schedule those sacraments during Lent (the usual April)? Personally, I’d prefer to use February rather than Lent for either, but I’m sure that would drive the DRE and YM batty. My DRE colleague Kathy and I decided to shift First Reconciliation out of Advent to mid-November. That’s a happy move, uncluttering the season before Christmas. We looked at doing a family reconciliation during Advent, but with the holy day coming on our religious ed night, we didn’t have the extra available Wednesday night. We have to balance the need for class nights with the student schedule. (They’re in finals by December 15th, and we don’t have classes for the little kids when about half our catechists have their own academic demands.

Anything strange you liturgists out there see on the horizon with this coming Easter?

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About catholicsensibility

Todd lives in the Pacific Northwest, serving a Catholic parish as a lay minister.

6 Responses to Liturgy Planning for 2011

Choirs used to getting the summer off might be surprised their directors will ask them to sing two weekends past Memorial Day for Ascension and Pentecost. Some newly ordained guys might be doing First Masses on those feasts, too.

You are doing first confessions six months before first communions? That seems pretty far apart to me. At our parish, first confessions are the day before first communion and the first communion mass is in the top 5 of the year in terms of attendance with all of the friends and relatives coming in from other parishes. After first confession, the kids become regular confessors like everybody else in the parish, I think most of them go about once per month.

We will be having confirmation in the fall this year, in October, because that is when it fit with the bishop’s schedule.

I’ve never been in a place that didn’t–seven parishes so far. In fact, as long as confession before communion is insisted upon, I’d say First Grade for reconciliation, and next year for First communion might be better. The DRE’s wince when I suggest that. Good thing they never put me in charge of RE.

That aside, the 2nd graders in my schools/parishes have been “regular confessors” in both Advent and Lent via the school/RE offering as well as any parents that bothered to bring them.

Does anyone present reconciliation as a recalling of baptism, as in bapt-conf-euch is initiation?

I have started doing that with confirmation candidates in the rcia, where it is a natural idea it only took me 20 years to think of. But I hadn’t thought of it for children’s initiation into the Eucharist, aka first communion.

…Corpus Christi on June 26. It’ll be interesting to see how many vacations are delayed to handle Eucharistic processions, especially outside the Northeast (where schools can tend to be open through mid-to-late June), or whether Corpus Christi ends up being just another Sunday on the calendar, with no special ceremonies or processions.

But the most interesting liturgical year, to me, was 1984. Easter was on April 22 – but that wasn’t the half of it. Pentecost was on June 10, so Corpus Christi (for those who celebrate it on Sunday) was June 24, bumping John the Baptist back one day. Sacred Heart was June 29, therefore, Peter and Paul were bumped back to Sunday, July 1. Saturday, June 30 was the Immaculate Heart of Mary (the first year, IIRC, it was a full memorial, rather than optional).